William Eggleston: The Making of a Photographer
WILLIAM EGGLESTON, the photographer, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939 but raised mostly in the small town of Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer and his maternal grandfather a well-known judge.
As a boy, William tended to amuse himself rather than play with groups of other children. He found it reassuring that when he was alone, he could be sharply judgmental without making a sound, without disturbing the universe. He liked to draw or play the piano; electronic devices interested him, as did cutting out pictures from magazines.
He had a fine memory, and stored impressions from his magazines to be consulted later. Presidents and actresses, the powerful and the beautiful, looked out at him, harmless at first glance, and their presentation in the magazine, because it was conventional, at first seemed inevitable. But he noticed that what was ‘clear and evident’ in news photographs was not nearly so clear when you looked more carefully. This took time.
He found transistor radios appealing but he could see that television was rudely pushing radio and newspapers aside. He found sanctuary in his own room, his own thoughts. In these hoarded minutes, when he thought about what he hoped to be when he grew up, William knew he didn’t want to be a judge, presiding over hearings and listening to boring, self-serving arguments from lawyers.
Being an engineer would be better; engineers get to solve problems. But he knew engineers had to spend a lot of time with their clients, and to be cheerful, and he found cheerful people strangely annoying.
His parents, hoping to make him a more conventional boy, or at least a boy at ease with convention, sent him to an ancient southern boarding school, the Webb School, in Bell Buckle, Tennessee.
The school was proud of being “nestled in the hills” of Bedford County, Tennessee but there William had a drastic loss of privacy, which he felt keenly and which made it harder to freely explore, and to develop his personality.
After the Webb School, over a five-year period, Eggleston attended three different colleges, Vanderbilt, Delta State and Ole Miss, without getting a degree from any of them. He found things he liked at each school but bristled at their deficits, and the schools bristled at William’s deficits, and after a while they’d agree to part ways.
But at Vanderbilt, a friend gave him a Leica camera. This was a great event, and a lucky accident. Leicas are compact, easy to hold and, when used with skill, can make a soft “buttery” image. This makes them perfect for street photography, for capturing unwilling or oblivious subjects.
Williams also began wading through books about photography, most of which he concluded were awful: caution of method combined with narrow range of subject matter. The photographers, self-proclaimed rebels, made photos that looked excruciatingly alike.
But then he happened upon “The Decisive Moment” by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and he loved that book the way you can only love a very few books in life.
There was also the remembered weight and value of those magazines he’d thumbed through as a boy, fixing certain images as worthy and discarding the rest. The person or object that ended up photographed was one thing; the decision by the magazine to illustrate a certain article with a photo of that person or object was a second thing. The means, the style, the angle of the photo was a third thing, and the way the magazine chose to crop or enlarge and caption the photo was yet another. All of these things were unspoken, entangled, and he wanted to untangle them and render private judgment.
He had absorbed without pleasure the conventional distinction between “high art” and “low art.” According to this idea, high art is made by the cultivated, for the cultivated, the connoisseur. Only the cultivated can fully appreciate it. The rare geniuses who make high art inspire awe. Low art, on the other hand, serves a pictorial or commercial function but never inspires awe, and is not worth our study. William disliked this way of looking at things but couldn’t articulate why.
He assumed he would take photographs in black and white, as Cartier-Bresson did, as almost all the “better” photographers did. There was an assumption that color film was for tourists, for people trying to document life without being artists.
Also, galleries and museums hated color photography. For one thing, the pigmentation in early color photos was quite unstable; museum conservators were afraid of buying a photograph for the museum’s permanent collection and watching helplessly as the colors slid away.
Beyond that, color photography seemed to many people to blur the line between art and commerce, and many people in the art world wanted that line to be very clear, and never to be crossed.
Still, Eggleston enjoyed experimenting with color photography as art and by the late 1960’s he was doing mostly color. His crucial development period was largely apart from mentors and teachers. He tried things, learned from his errors, made little innovations, and kept making them, and hanging on to the ones that touched him.
He might have been just as happy making photo albums for himself, never showing them to the public. He felt the pleasure was in the looking around, and the making of images, not in the public response to those images.
William Eggleston has never seen the taking of photographs as a sacred calling, nor as high art, nor even as systematic craft. It’s not catharsis, and it doesn’t come from a spiritual place. He dislikes the stock figure of the itinerant photographer, half-tormented by his special gift. He says of his photography, “It’s not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle… The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me.”
Be that as it may, his pastime, his work-without-struggle came to be highly regarded by serious photographers and critics. By 1974, Eggleston was teaching photography at Harvard, and by 1976 he had a show at the Museum of Modern Art — both a big moment for Eggleston personally and a validation of color photography as art.
He tries to practice “a democratic way of looking around” in which nothing is more or less important than anything else. One of his best photos is of a salt shaker, a pepper shaker, a sugar canister and a few other humble restaurant items huddled together on a checkered tablecloth at a diner.
Another wonderful photo is of a woman eating alone in a diner, enclosed by a dull green booth. We see her from the back, dominated by her beehive hairdo. Her right hand casually cradles a cigarette.
Or a tricycle seen from below, looking large and eager, much more ready to face the world than the ranch house does that we see in the distance.
William Eggleston likes to say, “I am at war with the obvious.”